The world of web 2.0 is all about sharing, collaboration, inclusion and equality. Nothing wrong with that. Personally speaking the more the better as it promotes pro-activity rather than passivity.

However, there has been disquiet in some quarters recently that all this open access is causing a “dumbing down” of quality content on the web. Andrew Keen commented on this in great detail in his book “The Cult of the Amateur” subtitling it as “How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture”. Although Keen puts forward a clear argument for closed portals and platforms he disregards the democratic ethos of the web.

Then FFFFound! comes along. A website that is brimming with a seemingly endless stream of excellent images “found” on the web and displayed on the site. Significantly FFFFound only allows registration to the site via referral from existing users and is therefore a self-regulating “closed” site. The casual visitor is allowed to view but not contribute.

In restricting users it conforms to Keen’s ideas of keeping the amateurs out. Indeed its supporters believe that the site would be swamped with inferior content by keeping them out and imply this has affected photo sharing sites like Flickr detrimentally. Conversely detractors accuse the site of being elitist.

FFFFound is undoubtedly a great way for designers and creatives to develop ideas and an outstanding image bookmarking service. There is strong emphasis on typography and photography and is a bit like browsing through a combination of old Graphis journals and Luerzers Archive.

The big question is whether this is a trend set to continue on the web. With a plethora of video and picture sharing sites already on the web are sites like FFFFound the way forward? Only time will tell.